The Order of Lenin: ‘Find Some Truly Hard People’

Delegates at the 16th Congress of the Russian Communist Party. The erased images belong to those who fell victim to Soviet political repression under Stalin.CreditSovfoto/UIG, via Getty Images

“Archives are power,” Kirill Mikhailovich Anderson, the former director of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow, once remarked to me. He was talking about the first director of the Marx-Engels Institute, founded in 1919: An old Bolshevik, David Riazanov had little patience for the Communist Party officials who constantly demanded documents either to confirm ideological positions or to blacken enemies.

One day, he took out a letter by Karl Marx, waved it in front of an astonished party boss’s face and shouted: “There is your Marx. Now go!” Riazanov ran afoul of Stalin in 1931, was arrested in 1937 and executed the following year.

Like thousands of other foreign publishers, scholars and journalists who streamed to Moscow in January 1992, I had come to the state archive after Boris Yeltsin’s proclamation in December 1991 that he would open the secret Soviet archives. (I went on behalf of Yale University Press.) The power Mr. Anderson invoked had a living presence there.

Many of the discoveries made in those archives capsized some of the standard histories of the Cold War, espionage in the Communist Party USA, Stalin’s Great Terror, the fates of writers and artists, and much else. To some, this new research confirmed previous positions; to others, it unsettled deeply held beliefs. Yet the greatest contribution has undoubtedly been in helping to deepen and give living nuance to the complexity of the overarching phenomenon of Soviet communism and the character of Joseph Stalin.

I once asked a Russian historian if we would get to the bottom of the archives of the K.G.B., the Soviet secret police, on a particular topic. “Of course,” he slyly replied. “But the K.G.B. has many bottoms.”

One of the murkiest issues has to do with the nature and causes of Stalin’s terror and the question of whether Stalin had broken with Lenin’s policies or continued them. Behind this lay the question of the institutionalization of violence in Bolshevik culture and the Soviet state.

Though a general acceptance of the use of political violence had been established early in the Russian revolutionary movement, going back to Sergey Nechayev’s 1869 manifesto “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” the policies of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party did not at first rely on terror. However, the extreme conditions of the civil war from 1917 to 1922, in which some seven million people were killed, together with Lenin’s ruthless economic policies, led to the destitution and desperation of millions of people who found themselves without food, livelihood, shelter or security.

Mass uprisings of the peasantry resulted from the Soviet state’s draconian methods of procuring grain supplies. The fledgling Bolshevik regime needed this staple to stave off famine in the cities, and seeing no other option, Lenin issued in August 1918 this order, later discovered in a secret archive: “Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.”

“Publish their names,” he instructed. “Take from them all the grain. Designate hostages.

“Do it in such a way so that for hundreds of versts around people will see, tremble, know, shout,” he went on, that the Bolsheviks “are strangling, strangling to death the bloodsucker kulaks.”

He concluded this grisly note with the directive: “Find some truly hard people.”

The following month, he ordered: “It is necessary secretly — and urgently — to prepare the terror.”

Lenin used terror against the avowed enemies of the state. Stalin turned it against the institutions of the state and Soviet society itself. Stalin followed Lenin, but surpassed him.

On Nov. 7, 1937, the anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin gave a toast at a meeting of Politburo leaders that was recorded by the Bulgarian Communist and leader of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov, in his published diary.

“I would like to say some words, perhaps not festive ones,” he said. “The Russian czars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. But they did one thing that was good. They amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state.”

He went on: “We have united the state in such a way that if any part were isolated from the common socialist state, it would not only inflict harm on the latter but would be unable to exist independently and would inevitably fall under foreign subjugation. Therefore, whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities — that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, his thoughts — threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”

At which Politburo members voiced their approval: “To the great Stalin!”

By then, the domestic enemies of Bolshevik power had been virtually eliminated, even the stubborn peasants who had been decimated in the famine of 1932-33. The 17th Party Congress in 1934 was hailed “The Congress of Victors,” and Andrei Zhdanov, the Leningrad party boss and a Stalin favorite, could declare at the Soviet Writers’ Congress that same year that “the main difficulties confronting us in the work of socialist construction have already been overcome.”

The paradox, then, is that Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936 at a time of relative peace and stability. The masses of enemies who suddenly appeared within Soviet society were largely invented. Millions of innocent people were arrested, tortured and shot, without evidence and according to quotas established in the Kremlin. Stalin did not bluff: Literally “anyone” could be guilty.

Nikolai Bukharin, the veteran Bolshevik and editor of Pravda, became one of those enemies: arrested in February 1937 and executed in March 1938. A letter he wrote to Stalin from his prison cell, on Dec. 10, 1937, is a rambling, pitiful epistle from a man who knows he is to die. Yet, astonishingly, he not only affirmed what Stalin had said to the Politburo the month before, but acknowledged his own role in creating the machine that now had him caught in its turbines.

“There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge,” he wrote. “This purge encompasses 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons potentially under suspicion. This business could not have been managed without me.”

The authoritarian state Bukharin envisioned was based on a permanent state of destabilization, in which disruption and fear were essential ingredients of government. The writer Lydia Chukovskaya depicted the fear at the core of this inverted world in her devastating 1939 novel, “Sofia Petrovna,” which was not published in Russia until the late 1980s. The heroine of the title “was now afraid of everyone and everything,” Chukovskaya wrote. “Perhaps they were already summoning her to the police station to take her passport away and send her into exile? She was afraid of every ring of the bell.”

Undermining the social order, abrogating the rule of law, putting fear at the core of individual consciousness and sowing distrust were essential to Stalin’s goal of eliminating any threat to his absolute power. Stalin not only eliminated possible party rivals in the Great Terror, but he also sent an unmistakable signal to the entire nation: If Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev could be guilty, everyone was under suspicion.

According to one account, Stalin kept Bukharin’s letter in the top drawer of his writing desk, where it was discovered after his death but published only after the fall of the Soviet Union.

With the conclusion of World War II, the nation had won a great victory over Hitler, yet Stalin recognized that as his physical decline set in, so too did his individual power begin to erode. His response was to prepare a second terror.

Once again, no one was safe. Stalin was furious that his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had allowed a speech by Winston Churchill to be published in full in Pravda. Molotov did not recognize their enemies. Then also, Zhdanov, now one of the most powerful members of the Politburo, earned Stalin’s ire when his son, Yuri, head of the science section of the Central Committee, conducted a closed seminar to discuss the work of the quack agronomist T. D. Lysenko, a Rasputin-like figure in Stalin’s government.

Stalin took vengeance in the old, familiar way: demanding physical torture as a method of dealing with political enemies; spreading paranoia, fear and distrust through society; inventing enemies; and presenting himself as the only capable leader in such troubled times. Through manipulation, patronage, brutality and stealth, Stalin unleashed an attack on the state itself. His power lay outside its formal structures, and in the final phase of Stalin’s tyranny, this assault culminated in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953, an invented crisis in which prominent Jewish doctors were accused of conspiring against the Soviet leadership. In essential continuity with the threat uttered in his toast of 1937, this new plot contained the seeds of even greater potential disaster because of the advent of the Cold War.

When Molotov did not find his name among those supposedly targeted for assassination by the Jewish doctors, he knew he was marked for destruction. He was not alone. Anastas Mikoyan, Kliment Voroshilov and other former Stalin acolytes feared their time had come. When, in 1952, the head of state security, Semyon Ignatiev, could not produce the phony confessions of the Jewish doctors fast enough, Stalin threatened to reduce his height “by a head.”

“Beat them, beat them, beat them with death blows,” he bellowed at the security chief. Ignatiev promptly had a heart attack and was removed from office.

“Look at you,” he said to a gathering of his close associates in December that year, “blind men, kittens, you don’t see the enemy; what will you do without me? — The nation will perish because you do not see the enemy.”

Only he, Stalin, could lead the nation, because only he, Stalin, could see the enemy. Only Stalin’s death, in March 1953, saved yet more comrades from destruction — and perhaps the rest of the world. Five months later, the Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb.